


And When I'm Dreaming

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, Reunions, Road Trips, probably not how drivers ed works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 09:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7886356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne Eiffel takes a road trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And When I'm Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> This is a hopelessly optimistic fic. Also, it's probably going to be decanoned in a hot second.  
> Title from I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by the Proclaimers.

The driving instructor holds out the license with a grin. “There you go, dear. Congratulations.” Anne takes it, shakes the woman’s hand, and hightails it out to her car. It’s a sweet little hatchback—second or third-hand but with an oil change it runs like new. It was an early sixteenth birthday present from her mother.

She goes around to the trunk and retrieves the backpack she hid there last night. A change of clothes. 50 dollars of her savings. Phone charger. Sandwich. Everything she needs for a road trip. It’s a thousand miles from Houston to Cape Canaveral. Fifteen hours, according to Google Maps. Anne has it all planned out.

Sure, her mom might not have intended her daughter to take a solo road trip as soon as she passed her driver’s test, but Anne has been planning this for months, ever since she got the news.

The day after her birthday. That’s the day her dad is coming home.

Anne puts the backpack in the passenger seat and plugs the directions into her phone. She starts driving without looking back.

At first she’s driving through downtown Houston, buildings and cars and smog surrounding her, but soon enough the city fades away. I-10 stretches out under her tires, flanked by endless grassland on either side. Anne has always been a Texas kind of girl.

In a few hours she’s in Louisiana, and the land becomes green and marshy. Around hour four, Atchafalaya Wildlife Refuge rises up around the freeway and swallows her. It dissolves into Baton Rouge barely an hour later, where Anne stops to get gas. Already everything looks different. 

She follows I-10 farther and farther east. Louisiana becomes Mississippi and Mississippi melts into Alabama, every mile subtly different. Trees bend over the highway and then vanish into swamps and fields. Anne feels like she's floating, almost intangible as the miles roll away. In Mobile, she crosses a bridge over the estuary and stares out to sea. Around midnight, she parks at a rest stop outside Tallahassee and replies to a text from her mom, who’s asking how the party is going.

Anne was surprised her mom bought the party story. She hasn’t been to a party or sleepover in ages. She’s the odd girl at school, the one with the jailbird astronaut dad and the fake leg.

To be honest, she’d rather be driving cross-country than going to a party. There’s a huge Florida moon that she can see if she leans her seat back and looks up and to the left. Tallahassee glows in the near distance. She is sixteen years old, and she feels free for the first time in years.

Now that she’s not driving, now that her ears aren’t full of the sound of tires on asphalt, the thoughts she’s been trying to ignore all day come to the surface.

What the hell is she going to do when she gets there? Her mom got an invite to the landing, because she’s family. So Anne is pretty sure she’ll be allowed in. But what does she do after that? It’s been _five years_ , and suddenly that feels insurmountable.

Will he even recognize her?

Will she even recognize him?

Anne only remembers the accident in bits and pieces. Screeching tires, bright lights, her father’s cry. It was the kind of sound you’d get if you broke a falcon’s wings, the kind of sound that makes the sky fall down.

In fact, that’s all she remembers from that day. And then she never saw her dad again.

Anne curls up in the driver’s seat and closes her eyes, tries to force the thoughts away. She has to believe that everything is going to be okay. That’s been her mantra for the past five years.

Finally, she sleeps.

 

It’s sunny and warm in Cape Canaveral. The sky is blue and shot through with wispy clouds. Anne is sitting on the hood of her car and basking in the sun.

So now she’s here. Parked right on the tarmac, because she’s family. There’s a middle-aged guy, too, with heaps of photography stuff in the back seat of his car. He’s twisting a gold ring around and around his finger. And an older couple sitting in their sleek black sedan, holding hands. Both have worry lines on their brows, around their eyes.

_Exiting orbit_ , the PA mutters.

Anne pulls her knees up to her chest—one flesh and one titanium—and wraps her arms around them. She keeps watching the sky. There’s a crowd of reporters gathered, a group of business types in suits, a SWAT team. Announcements regularly crackle from the PA. Anne hears none of it. Her hands are shaking, her lips tight, because now that she’s here she hardly dares to hope.

_What if something happens? If he doesn’t come home?_

She orders herself to stop thinking that.

From the PA, _five minutes to landing_. Rustling from the reporters. Everyone is watching the sky, looking northward past the pale blue horizon.

At first, when she sees it, she thinks it’s a mirage.

But it’s too sleek and too solid and flying too straight, and her heart clenches and her breath catches, because it’s her dad, it’s her dad coming home.

She slides off the hood of her car and half-runs a few steps forward. The photographer and the couple get out of their cars. The shuttle comes soaring down, closer and closer, growing more and more distinct. The PA chatters status updates.

_Three… two… one…_

Touchdown. Sparks fly up from the wheels, the shuttle skids as it hurtles down the runway, and finally it comes to a stop.

Then the door is opening with a pneumatic hiss, and the crew is stumbling out on shaky legs: a woman with a military haircut hurries out first, and the photographer almost sprints to her, spins her around in his arms and dips her into a kiss. She comes up laughing and tips her forehead against his. Then another woman, who stops short on the tarmac to tilt her face up into the sunshine. The couple rush forward; there are tears on the older woman’s—her mother’s?—cheeks.

Anne misses the others, because a hunger-thin man with ruffled hair and tired eyes comes down the steps next, and he looks like all the pictures she has, and even though he bears a few new scars and a lot more lines, she recognizes those eyes. They look exactly like her own.

He looks around him, laughs, stomps a shaky foot on the ground and stares directly at the sun. He pumps a fist and shouts something incoherent but gleeful. He’s still blinking light from his eyes when he sees her.

They start toward each other simultaneously, first walking, then running. Anne wraps her arms around her dad’s neck and holds on tight, and he says in a voice that sounds choked with tears, “How’d you get so tall?”

“Hi, Dad,” she says back.

“I love you, sweetie,” he says. “I missed you so much. I can’t believe I’m here…”

They stand there in the sunlight, silent for a long moment.

“You got a prosthetic, huh? Guess I'd better call you Annie Skywalker now."

Anne grins and shows off her shiny new leg. Good for walking, soccer, and kicking people who tease her about it.

“So Goddard paid up,” he mutters.

She gives him an odd look. “Mom and I saved for this. Goddard? Didn’t they hire you?”

His face twists. “Bastards.” Eiffel steps back to hold his daughter at arm’s length and looks her in the eyes. “Annie, I’m so, so sorry. This is all my fault—“ he gestures to her prosthetic, to the shuttle—“and I’ll understand if you never forgive me for what I did.”

“It’s been tough, Dad,” she whispers.

He nods. Lets her go. His hands fall to his sides, and she just can’t do it. “I missed you too,” Anne says, and a broken smile spreads across his face.

This is their ending: the end of five years, the end of space, the end of missing each other. This is their beginning: the start of the future, the start of being here, the start of doing things better. And that's all either of them was looking for, really, so maybe that's enough.


End file.
